


To No Man's Lure

by ConstanceComment



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Bar Room Brawl, Canon Compliant, Community: makinghugospin, Fluff and Angst, Friendship, Gen, Hallucinations, Hypnotism, Insomnia, Kink Meme, M/M, Masturbation, Mild Gore, Painting, References to Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Sleep Deprivation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 12:45:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/867699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ConstanceComment/pseuds/ConstanceComment
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold,<br/>A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?"<br/>— Charles Algernon Swinburne, <i>Hymn to Proserpine</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	To No Man's Lure

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [this prompt on the kinkmeme](http://makinghugospin.livejournal.com/13488.html?thread=9928112#t9928112). If you're coming from there, be aware; the ending has changed.
> 
> The title comes from Swineburne's _The Garden of Proserpine_ , the second of two of his poems on which this story was based.

Grantaire is not certain how he came to find himself on a quest for sleep. All that he knows is that for several nights now, he has been unable to find meaningful rest. What little he is able to catch is poor in quality, and riddled with nightmares.

It’s not that he isn’t tired. Grantaire has had to explain this to many of his friends, and has succeeded less with each attempt. Exhaustion is a powerful, patient, inexorable force that sits on his shoulders, fogging his mind worse than most drinks he has cared to sample. His body is heavy under its weight, and after three days without more than seven hours of intermittently spaced sleep, Grantaire is beginning to ache everywhere under the strain of keeping his eyes open. Which isn’t to say that he’s trying to sleep, rather, it’s more that since he can’t, he’d rather see what goes on around him, even if he does not register much of it.

His friends, being good, lovely people, have taken it upon themselves to help cure Grantaire of his condition, though he wonders at how much energy they have expended on his account over this past week and more of sleepless nights and fitful days. He feels as if he is hardly alone, and it warms him in strange ways to know that they would not abandon him, even as the revolution grows nearer with the ending of the spring.

Joly, because they drink together and because he is frighteningly perceptive, was the first to notice that something was wrong with Grantaire. Bossuet, who is Joly’s other half (or perhaps Joly is his), was the second to notice, but only by virtue of being the third person to most of their drinking parties.

“So soon?” Joly asked one evening, the Corinthe quiet and lonely in the wee hours of the morning.

“What?” Grantaire said, confused.

Joly gestured to his hand, where Grantaire noticed he had let his bottle list, spilling some of the red wine onto the table.

“It’s fairly early for you to be so done in,” Joly remarked. “I’d never accuse you of being unable to hold your drink, but—” Joly shrugged, spreading his hands, careful not to spill his own glass of wine.

“Ah,” Grantaire said quietly, and turned the bottle back up, contemplating the dark green glass.

“Grantaire?” Bossuet, this time, spoke up, and placed his own bottle on the table, worry furrowing his brow. “Is something wrong?”

“The wine is thin,” Grantaire muttered, and put the bottle down.

Joly did not take the deflection, and his face grew a frown to match Bossuet’s. “Do you have a fever? It is far too early in the night for you to be so far gone.”

“I am not,” Grantaire protested, shaking his head. Unfortunately for him, this only aggravated his sleep-deprived headache. At the pain, Grantaire winced a bit, and put his head down into a nest of his folded arms, moaning slightly.

“Obviously,” Bossuet said drily, and Grantaire heard the clink of glass as Bossuet put his bottle down as well.

“I am fine,” Grantaire protested, voice muffled in the wood of the table.

“Now I’m certain you have a fever,” Joly said, and his displeasure was audible.

“It’s nothing to be worried about—”

“R,” Joly interrupted him, careful but firm, “when is the last time you slept?”

At that, Grantaire had looked up, and blinked at the concerned faces of his friends.

“This morning,” he admitted after a pause.

“Did you sleep the night before?” Joly prompted him.

“Define sleep,” he mumbled instead of answering, though from Joly’s sigh, perhaps that admission was answer enough.

“Go home, R,” Joly prodded him gently. “Try to get some rest.”

“I can’t,” Grantaire replied.

“Has your landlord locked you out?” Bossuet asked him. “I’m sure Musichetta wouldn’t mind if we brought you home to sleep on the spare mattress.”

“No, it’s not that,” Grantaire responded. “Though you kindness is noted, not that I would presume on you in such a way—”

“R,” Joly prodded him with a finger, “get on with it, if you will.”

Grantaire closed his eyes, and lowered his chin onto his forearm. “I cannot sleep,” he muttered. “No matter how I try, no matter how much I drink, or fight, or paint— nothing.”

Grantaire heard the scraping of a chair along the ground, then felt a warm hand on his forehead. “Come home with us anyway,” Joly offered. “At the least, you will have someone to share the night with you, instead of staring at your walls alone.”

In his better moments, Grantaire would not have imposed, and found a better way to beg out of the proposal, citing the horridness of his hangovers, his morning breath, his surliness at any time before noon. But this was not one of Grantaire’s better moments.

As they had before, in albeit under different circumstances, Joly and Bossuet found themselves carrying Grantaire home, this time to their apartment rather than his own. Upon arrival, Musichetta had obligingly put sheets upon the spare mattress, and tutted over Grantaire’s state before pushing him down and settling in besides him with a book of poems, refusing to listen to any of his protests.

Joly and Bossuet had spread themselves beside her, with Grantaire sandwiched somewhat between the three of them. As the night wore on, Bossuet had eventually fallen asleep on Joly’s shoulder, but Musichetta’s voice had remained steady as she wove her way through the verses, small hands turning the pages while Joly’s fingers played along the bare skin of her arms, illuminated in the moonlight.

Grantaire thought of the paintings he would make of this moment, and considered the paints he would use. From the bemused look Joly had sent him as Grantaire slowly lowered his head into Musichetta’s lap, he perhaps was mumbling his intentions out loud. Eventually someone’s fingers had found their way into his hair, soothing at his scalp. At that, Grantaire had drifted uneasily into sleep, and remained that way for at least several hours, though he still woke long before dawn.

The three lovers were still slumped about him when Grantaire arose, and he found himself unable to extract himself from the sprawl. So trapped, he remained for another hour at least, and found himself resting pleasantly, unable to fall back asleep, but peacefully enjoying his friends’ quiet company, and the even sounds of their breathing.

* * *

Things continued in much the same way for several days and nights, with Grantaire stealing scant few hours wherever he could. Joly and Bossuet made it clear that he would always be welcome with them, but Grantaire found himself more and more able to decline their offers of asylum, not wanting to in any way steal them from Musichetta, or to impose on their hospitality, not matter how willingly it was offered to him.

Bahorel, being astute when the moment called for it, was the next among Grantaire’s friends to notice his condition, having chanced upon Grantaire while the cynic stared blindly at one of the Corinthe’s walls, thoughtlessly admiring the incomprehensible patterns to the way that the paint had begun to crack upon the plaster.

Bahorel’s remedy, of course, was to chase Grantaire’s sleeplessness away with violent exercise, knowing Grantaire’s ability to hold his own in a fight, being proficient as he was in singlestick and fencing, and one of Bahorel’s better drinking friends.

“If you are exhausted physically, then surely your body will bow to the wishes of your mind, and rest,” Bahorel explained as he led Grantaire to a pub that neither of them had before set foot in. “All we should have to do is tire you out properly; then you should be able to rest.”

Understanding his friend and his nature, Grantaire had not tried to shy away from Bahorel’s planned adventure. He had, however, mounted his protests, though halfheartedly; “and if we find ourselves at rest within a jail cell because we have been beaten unconscious for instigating a fight?”

Bahorel looked back at Grantaire and smiled, showing far too many of his teeth, and the crooked profile of his oft-broken nose. “Then we shall have to rely on our friends’ good fortune and my own skills as a legal student, and talk our way out of bondage.”

“Of course,” Grantaire agreed, more caustic than he would have been were in full control of his faculties, “how silly of me to expect otherwise.”

To his credit, Bahorel had only laughed, and taking Grantaire’s hand, had run with him into a pub, and promptly decked the first patron that he found, laying him flat, and attracting several of his friends.

Grantaire had not been anywhere close to par as he fought, throwing punches blindly as the fray spilled out into the street. Adrenaline surged through is veins, bringing him closer to more adequate awareness than he had felt in days, and more lively than he felt he had been in longer. Eventually, struck by the absurdity of his situation, Grantaire began to laugh, and did not stop until the fight had turned against them, and they began to run, pell-mell through the alleys of Paris, bruised and battered and frighteningly alive.

Though perhaps, this last was not true; Grantaire chanced a look at Bahorel and gasped, a sick feeling in his stomach as he noticed his friend’s wounds. Bahorel had been pierced through the chest, and the stomach, the holes in his body running red all down his waistcoat. What remained of Grantaire’s laughter died in his throat to become breathless panic as he dragged Bahorel back towards his apartment, worried that his friend did not react to his wounds, or to Grantaire’s sudden burst of haste.

Miraculously, they were not arrested on their run, and by the time that they found their way back to Bahorel’s apartment, Grantaire’s exhaustion had returned to him, an old, unwelcome friend. Bahorel was quick to strip his ruined shirt, and once his skin was bare, the piercing wounds Grantaire had seen at his stomach and breast were gone, as if they had never been. Bahorel then loaned Grantaire one of his own shirts, and looked at him quizzically when the cynic could only stare at him.

Bahorel then moved them both to the mattress, a motion that Grantaire was too worn to protest, or even wish to, confused and battered. They fell asleep that way, with the moon wide and full outside the window, Bahorel having pulled Grantaire tight to his body, using him as a sort of full-body pillow. Grantaire at first could not enjoy the embrace; no matter what he did, he could not make the slick feeling of blood at his back where he pressed against Bahorel’s front dissipate. When he slept, he did so poorly, and only until sunrise.

* * *

Combeferre was next to be clued into Grantaire’s quest for sleep, having been the one to put him and Bahorel back together after their night on the town.

“How much did the two of you drink?” He prodded Grantaire as he examined shallow cut along his forearm where a broken glass had sliced him.

“Nothing!” Grantaire protested, before he corrected himself; “well, no more so than our usual.”

“You need a bit of fortification to go into a fight like that!” Bahorel agreed cheerfully, wincing when his enthusiastic nod pulled at the skin over his shoulder, which had been bruised in a fall.

At such a pronouncement, Combeferre had huffed at them, and made comfortably small Bahorel’s apartment, filling it with the quiet warmth that two good people and one half-soused cynic could inspire when they were in the company of each other as friends.

Outside the window of Grantaire’s apartment, the sun was rising slowly with the beginning of the day. Beneath it, Grantaire saw a mountain of shattered furniture, and banners soaked in blood. He had only looked for a minute or so; he had not wished to contemplate it for long, and further, his loving friends were in the room with him. His morbidity he was determined to deny for the moment, and focus on the living for now.

“Why were you fighting, anyhow?” Combeferre asked them as he finished cleaning out Grantaire’s cut, moving on to examine Bahorel’s shoulder.

“Our friend here cannot sleep,” Bahorel informed him, gesturing towards Grantaire with his uninjured arm, “I had thought to wear him out with physical exertion, but was unable to keep him down for more than a few hours at the most.”

“You did admirably,” Grantaire assured his friend, though his jaw creaked when he took that moment to yawn unfortunately.

“Not admirably enough, if you are still tired,” Combeferre had mused, narrowing his eyes over his glasses as he finished his examinations of Bahorel’s arm. “If you would allow me,” he said after a moment’s thought, “there is something I would like to try, and see if I could solve your dilemma.”

“Feel free to try what you please,” Grantaire had offered, and thus it came to be that he found himself staring at a coin as Combeferre did his best to hypnotize him into sleep.

Ultimately, nothing was gained from this endeavor, save the quieting of Bahorel, who had been sitting behind Grantaire, and a day’s worth of quiet pleasure spent in a friend’s apartment, with good company and easy conversation, and a raid on Bahorel’s small store of wine.

* * *

After Combeferre, was Courfeyrac, who came upon Grantaire when he returned to the Corinthe that evening with Bahorel and Combeferre in tow.

“Grantaire!” Courfeyrac called out happily, slinging an arm around his shoulder before stealing his bottle. “It’s much too early in the day for you to already be so out of sorts!”

“Why does everyone always assume that I am drunk?” Grantaire muttered despairingly.

“Because you most often are, my friend,” Courfeyrac said genially. “Though you say you are not, so I must believe you, and not only because this bottle is still mostly full.”

“I am working on that,” he assured Courfeyrac, but did not seek to disentangle himself from his friend’s embrace, nor take the bottle back.

“Put the bottle down, Courfeyrac,” Combeferre scolded him with rolling eyes, reaching over to take the offending item.

“But I had only just acquired it,” Courfeyrac had protested with a smile, “and the afternoon is only just beginning; how could I possibly—”

At this, Bahorel, who had entered behind Combeferre, elbowed him in the ribs, and carefully unwound Grantaire from Courfeyrac’s amiable grip.

“Leave him alone, you charmer,” Bahorel said, and pulled Grantaire, still woozy from his lack of sleep, to a table, where he was quick to fold his arms and rest his head.

“So what is wrong with our friend?” Courfeyrac asked, following them.

“He’s suffering from a bout of sleeplessness,” Combeferre explained in low tones. “Bahorel found him staring at the walls the other night, and Grantaire says that it’s been days since he slept for more than a few hours at a stretch, and even then it has been fitfully.”

“I can attest to this myself,” Bahorel agreed, his arm pressed lightly against Grantaire’s as he stretched out along the table himself. “I wore him out this previous night—” and here Grantaire heard a scuffle, and a small snicker from Courfeyrac before Bahorel resumed speaking on the note of “not like that, though certainly I would have if not for my lady mistress, and in any case, I could not entreat him to sleep for more the scant hours we had until sunrise.”

Courfeyrac hummed in musing, and for a while Grantaire lost track of the hushed conversation that followed, his mind wandering behind closed eyelids, though not truly resting, much to his personal chagrin.

When he became aware again, night had fallen over Paris, and the Latin Quarter had come alive with the sounds of singing and laughter, the Corinthe filled with customers, flowing spirits, and merriment.

“R, we’re moving to the back room,” Combeferre said gently.

Bahorel tugged at his elbow until Grantaire stood, and let the cynic lean on him as they made their way to their regular meeting place. Grantaire went with them easily enough, though he was unsteady on his feet. His body was lined with lead, and his head stuffed with cotton. Grantaire could barely concentrate, and was not having much more success with placing his feet one in front of the other in any pattern so much as approaching a straight line.

Eventually, his friends deposited him at yet another table, where they were content to let him slump as they bustled in and out of the room, the three of them returning after every trip with a few pillows, a mattress, a blanket.

“What is it that you are doing?” Grantaire asked them, trying to focus, though he was still eminently bleary.

“Preparing a fort,” Courfeyrac told him, somewhat cryptically, and his smile was much too wide.

“I do not think that I like this plan,” Grantaire said warily, only to grunt an exhale when Bahorel thumped him vigorously on the back. “Further, I fail to see the purpose or wisdom in building a fort when my affliction is sleeplessness, not an invasion by foreign powers or the military forces of tyrannical despots by which embody the state—”

“R,” Courfeyrac cut him off despairingly, balancing one cushion atop another, “we’re building you a pillow fort, not a barricade.”

“Our fearless leader would surely assert that you needed the practice, if this is the best that your current efforts could produce,” Grantaire mused disparagingly, watching as the lumpy shapes began to resolve themselves into a defensive position at the hands of his friends.

“Be fair, Grantaire, we _are_ building with an inferior set of materials,” Combeferre interjected, straightening the fold of one of the load-bearing blankets. “I’m sure that when the day comes, our barricade will be much sturdier.”

“Ah, of course, forgive my impetuousness,” Grantaire apologized, gesturing to the somewhat unsteady-looking fortress “but certainly we must agree that this construction could not begin to withstand any sort of offensive action, nor serve as an adequate bastion in the least for—”

“R,” Bahorel huffed, shaking his head and smiling as he pulled him into the pile through what Grantaire supposed was meant to be the front gate of the contraption, “please, for just one night, stop being so cynical about everything. You’re not here to judge the feasibility of the fort, you’re here to sleep in it.”

“I fail to see how this is going to be in any way conducive to my finding unconsciousness,” Grantaire said, still eminently dubious of the entire proceeding.

“The plan is simple,” Courfeyrac told him as the four of them did their best to get situated within the confines of the fort. “Step one, assemble the fort, which as you see, we have done.”

“Poorly,” Grantaire pointed out, looking pointedly at the blanket canopy, which had at that point sagged somewhat, only held aloft by Bahorel’s head.

“Step three,” Courfeyrac continued, undaunted, “we regale one another with stories until we are tired, at which point we sleep for as long as the Corinthe’s owners are willing to let us do so.”

“Unless I have begun to hallucinate once more, you have missed the second step,” Grantaire said, baffled, and a bit worried.

“You’ve been hallucinating?” Combeferre interjected, concern audible in his voice. “Grantaire, if you’ve been hallucinating, perhaps you should see a physician.”

“Do you not count?” Grantaire asked, only to have his attention pulled over once more by Courfeyrac, who had again thrown an arm over his shoulder.

“Don’t worry Grantaire, there was no second step,” Bahorel assured him, “our friend is not so good at planning.” At this, the fort’s canopy chose to cave inward, falling onto Bahorel’s head, causing him to thrash somewhat as he and Combeferre struggled to remove it from his person.

“Or fort-making, apparently,” Grantaire said faintly, and at Courfeyrac’s wounded and scandalized expression, he began to laugh, and was unable to stop for nearly a minute, his eyes swimming with tears and his lungs aching for air.

Eventually, the others joined him, and the back room was filled with raucous, nigh-unexplainable laughter. Though Grantaire was still unable to sleep, he at least found his evening occupied, as wine was quick to be supplied after that, and the stories were found to be quickly flowing, and entertaining for all.

* * *

After Courfeyrac’s attempt had been Jehan.

“I had heard you were feeling low,” Jehan said by way of greeting, walking into Grantaire’s apartment one evening a few nights after the fort-making escapades in the Corinthe, letting himself in before Grantaire could so much as step away from the door.

Jehan has always been a tempest in his own way, and that night had been no different. The poet swept swept into Grantaire’s home and simply installed himself in a corner by the window, propping himself up against the place where the walls met with a pillow stolen from the bed and a candle with which to write by, his notebook, a pen, and an inkwell quickly produced for his purposes.

Just beneath his hairline was a patch of blood and a bullet hole, not bleeding but charred, as if he had been shot from close range, or executed.

“Sit,” the poet commanded Grantaire, who had been struck dumb, and was imperious with it for only a moment before he had smiled, somewhat meekly, and amended his request with a “please, R.”

“I— yes,” Grantaire had managed to say, and when he blinked, the wound was gone. After a moment, he added, with some bitterness; “I suppose that you have come to cure me of my ill feelings, then?”

“Of course not,” Jehan had replied, looking slightly affronted. “Your ‘ill feelings,’ as you put them are just as valid and vibrant as your ebullient ones, Grantaire. I would no more cure you of them than I would strip the cloud from its silver, or of its rain.”

At this pronouncement, Grantaire paused and looked down at his friend. Jehan, who was often soft-spoken, and generally timid, was courageous, too, and this most often was forgotten of him, like Bahorel’s caring heart, or Courfeyrac’s somewhat-occasionally-employed good sense.

“You are a good friend, Jehan Prouvaire,” Grantaire told him, quietly but fervently, and could not help but smile back when Jehan’s face lit with a silent beam.

Going to join him on the ground, Grantaire had allowed himself to be pulled against the poet’s side, then lowered to the ground, until they were both sprawled over the ground, the pillow levered under Jehan’s chest for the sake of his comfort as he began to write.

“Now,” Jehan began, dipping his pen into the inkwell with something of a flourish, “do you know any words that one could rhyme with inconsolable?”

Grantaire groaned, the complexities of language having escaped him days ago with most of his higher faculties of reasoning. “I rescind my earlier statement,” he mumbled into the his hands, which he had pillowed under his face, “you are a cruel man, Jehan Prouvaire, to make such demands of those incompetent from lack of sleep.”

“Yes,” Jehan agreed easily, “but do you know a suitable word?”

“Uncontrollable,” Grantaire answered after a pause, and was rewarded for his efforts with an absentminded pat to the head, Jehan’s hand springing in his tousled bed of curls.

“It’s an off rhyme, but much better,” the poet praised him, and the room was filled with a companionable silence broken only by the sound of a scratching pen, and occasional requests for more rhymes, proof of life that did well to dispel Grantaire’s visions of violence, and his friend’s demise.

* * *

The next evening, returning to his apartment in an attempt to sleep once more, Grantaire found himself ambushed by Marius, which was not entirely unlike being bowled over by an ill-trained puppy. Under normal circumstances, Grantaire would not have been so startled, Marius being so conspicuous as he always invariably was, but these were no normal circumstances.

“You cannot sleep?” Marius asked him by way of greeting, helping Grantaire from the ground, a concerned pout etched into his face.

“Why hello Marius,” Grantaire replied sarcastically, brushing the dirt from his sleeves, “it is most wonderful to see you, and I am overjoyed at your deigning to grace one so cynical as I with your presence, and how lovely it is of an evening tonight—”

“There’s no need to be sarcastic, Grantaire,” Éponine cut him off, appearing behind Marius as Grantaire did his best to regain his footing.

“Ah, but is sarcasm not a reason in and of itself?” Grantaire mused, wistful, and wishing that he’d had the foresight to take a bottle back with him from the Corinthe this evening.

“No,” Éponine said shortly, but her expression was bemused as she came to stand alongside Marius, fussing with the dirt at his collar from the tumble to the ground.

“He knocked me into the dirt;” Grantaire protested, “that’s more than enough reason for sarcasm.”

“I _am_ sorry for that, by the way,” Marius said sheepishly, rubbing at the back of his hair, further upsetting his already disheveled appearance.

“Have no worries, Marius, I meant nothing by my acerbity,” Grantaire assured him tiredly, his head spinning from the speed of his standing, though he could have sworn that he had not done so with any particularly great haste.

“In any case, you’re slurring,” Éponine told him, giving Grantaire a quick once-over. “Have you been drinking?”

“No!” He protested, and a bit too loudly, for Marius winced, still being in close proximity to Grantaire. “No, I have not been drinking, or at least, not overly much.”

“That is unusual for you, then,” Éponine commented, Marius moving to prop Grantaire up, pulling one of the cynic’s arms around his shoulder, which helped, though it was awkward, Marius being taller than Grantaire by a somewhat significant degree.

“Is there a reason that you have accosted me?” Grantaire asked after a moment, though still content to let himself be led through the alleyways of Paris.

“Well,” Marius began, “I had heard from Courfeyrac that you were having trouble sleeping, and of course I told Éponine, and the two of us began to think, and eventually stumbled upon what we suppose may be a solution for your problem—”

“You need to have sex,” Éponine told Grantaire bluntly.

“Pardon me, _what_?” Grantaire goggled at her. “I am not entirely certain that I heard you correctly—”

“Then let me clarify things for you,” Éponine replied, frowning at him. “You,” Éponine enunciated clearly, jabbing him in the chest with every word. “Need. To. Have. Sex.”

“That does not elucidate matters, I am afraid,” Grantaire said faintly, wondering once more if he was in fact hallucinating.

“What she means,” Marius hurried to explain, “is that a release of sexual tensions can often lead to a better and deeper rest than otherwise could be achieved.”

“I do not want to know how you know this,” Grantaire told Marius weakly, “I prefer to think of you as virginal and fumbling through the world. Please do not tell me that you have had intimate experience, dear Marius—”

“Still slurring,” Éponine told him, amused and brisk while Marius shot Grantaire a confused look, his face blank with worried lack of understanding.

“I rather suspect that you heard every word of that,” Grantaire accused her, but Éponine only smiled at him, saying nothing.

Éponine reached out to steady him as he swayed, but he flinched at her approach, seeing a ruined mess at the end of her wrist. She frowned at him a moment, and his grimace of silent apology, touched him anyway. When her skin met the cloth of his shirt above his elbow, Grantaire felt its living warmth, and saw that her hand had become whole, as if the injury had never been there.

“I am hallucinating,” Grantaire eventually decided, with faint wonder coloring his tone as he looked at the hole that remained above Éponine’s heart. “I am hallucinating, and the two of you are merely tactile and cruel apparitions sent to torment me—”

“That,” Marius interrupted him, frowning, “I understood, and I can assure you that we are no hallucinations. We are your friends, Grantaire, and we would see you find some way into Morpheus’s kingdom, even if we would have to pay for it ourselves.”

At Grantaire’s confused expression, Éponine’s smile grew into a grin, playful and mischievous. “What?” She asked him, false innocence coloring her tone as she stepped away, “you didn’t think that either of us would volunteer, did you?”

“I do not know _what_ I thought,” Grantaire admits, “not when you had come to me with such a suggestion at a time when my mind is so addled I can barely stand unaided, let alone contemplate the more base functions of one’s human body.”

“Your inability to stand does raise a few problems, however,” Marius allowed, and turned Grantaire back towards his own apartment, away from whatever seedy destination he had originally planned. “Perhaps, instead, it would be better for you to solve your own problem.”

“Get better acquainted with your hands,” Éponine suggested, a look of false innocence plastered on her face. “I’ve heard that all you artist types are good with those, and have long fingers, too.”

Grantaire was never more glad in his life as he was the moment that Marius and Éponine deposited him at his apartment. Marius had left with the uncertain air about him of one who was unsure that he had done a good deed, but who was comforted by the knowledge that he had tried his best. Éponine’s parting wink had been mortifying, but Grantaire could see the logic in their plan. As they retreated, Grantaire made certain to focus on Marius’s form, as he was devoid of injuries, where he could still see the blood at Éponine’s breast, and the shattered mess of her palm.

Sighing, he contemplated the horror of studying his walls for yet another night, and eventually gave in. In a bout of wishful thinking, Grantaire changed into his nightshirt and made himself as comfortable in his bed as he was able, the spring air thick and live in the room with him, the muffled sounds of Paris trickling in from outside his windows.

For lack of any better suggestions, he took himself in hand, and did his best to steer his thoughts from marble gods or a firebrand demagogues, preferring to keep the safer realm of fantasy, and not merely that which he could not have. His mind strayed, of course, as restless minds are wont to do, and though Grantaire came despite his own rough handling and hated himself for it, he hated more that he in fact slept, and that what dreams that followed him into the subconscious realm were fitful and warm, smelling of gunpowder and blood, tasting of a familiar smile that he had never seen made singularly in his direction alone.

* * *

In the morning, Grantaire found that he had slept through sunrise, and still hated himself.

It was in this state that Feuilly found him, morose and disquietingly sober, watching Paris out the window as it awoke, the streets coming alive in ways that Grantaire still found himself unable to, one night’s sleep not nearly enough to make up for a fortnight awake.

“Bahorel told me that you could use a friend,” Feuilly said quietly when Grantaire opened the door, drawing him into a loose embrace. “I had thought that I might fill such a position for you, if you were so willing.”

Tentatively, Grantaire brought his arms up behind the workingman’s back, and as Feuilly did not pull away from him, he wrapped them around him, clutching at his shoulderblades, resting his head on Feuilly’s shoulder.

They stood this way for a minute or so, Grantaire in his nightshirt and trousers, Feuilly in his daily clothes, patched and worn. They must have been a sight for any who would have cared to pass through the apartment hallway, but no one came, and eventually it was Grantaire who pulled away, tugging Feuilly after him by the hand.

“I am more than willing,” Grantaire said eventually, and his voice was thick with exhaustion and sleep. “You are kinder than I deserve, I think, but I am too selfish to drive you away.”

“I am not kind,” Feuilly corrected him, smiling. “Bahorel also told me that you had recently purchased new paints, and I am also here to see if you would be willing to lend them to me, as well as a canvas, or three.”

At this pronouncement, Grantaire could only smile. “Whatever I have is yours, my friend,” Grantaire assured him, and cleared his throat to restore to his voice some semblance of normalcy.

For a time, the two of them were subsumed in the quiet pleasures of mixing paints and cutting canvases, preparing the tolls of their craft as best they saw fit. Feuilly preferred smaller canvases while Grantaire worked better in mid-sized mediums, preparing a canvas at his easel while Feuilly measured out a smaller piece, preferring instead a block canvas propped against a table rather than a proper easel, which was fine, as Grantaire had only the one, though he had tried to offer it to his friend.

The day passed in companionable silence, both of them sparing little attention for anything other than their arts. Neither of them were able to indulge in creation half so much as they would wish to, Grantaire for reasons of chronic intoxication and lack of inspiration, and in the case of Feuilly, exhaustion and a lack of time born from work near-unceasing, and the expense of good material.

Grantaire has for a long time regarded it as a truism that those in altered mental states produce more powerful creative works, though often he found himself too drunk to paint correctly. But at a level of intoxication that was only slight and a level of exhaustion that was far greater, he found that his creativity flowed unimpeded, though darker perhaps than his works should have been.

Determined to create something worthy, and perhaps useful as well, Grantaire set about drafting the idea he had first thought of so many nights ago when Bossuet and Joly first invited him back to their apartment. Under his fingers grew the penciled shapes of three people curled against a wall. They were folded into one another, and their lines were indistinct in the moonlight Grantaire was careful to mark, fading into a single unit as opposed to three separate beings, and yet they were distinct as well, the colors Grantaire ascribed them marked by small swatches of paint.

For the rest of the morning and throughout the afternoon, Grantaire worked on that same painting, letting himself be consumed by his work, the steady movement of brushes its own hypnotism, the sharp, heady smell of paint its own intoxicant. Near the window, near the sunlight but still out of it, was Feuilly, who worked steadily on several projects at once, moving from piece to piece as he so chose, finishing more than two before the sun had set completely and they were forced to light a lantern, the soft light of the flame casting the room into ambient shadow.

“What are you making?” Grantaire asked Feuilly, gesturing expansively at the paper in his friend’s hands.

“Hm?” Feuilly hummed distractedly before looking up from the rough lines as they coalesced themselves into a better image, faint letters appearing beneath his hands. “Oh,” he said, “it’s the beginning of a pamphlet, I think. Enjolras wants them distributed, and Marius knows someone with a printing press. Jehan and Enjolras will have the words to fill it; all that we need now is the illustration.”

“Ah,” Grantaire said, and did his best to keep the grimace off his face, and to ignore the specter of death he saw sitting Feuilly’s shoulder, as surely a hallucination now as it had been every time before, and as it had been in his own mirror last night when he changed into his nightshirt.

“I know you do not believe, R,” Feuilly responded steadily, unheeding of the skull-faced bird that sat upon his bones, “but you have to understand that we believe, that there is something we find worth fighting for.”

“I believe that much,” Grantaire assures him, stomach sinking with dread, “I just cannot fathom how it is that you could die for such ideals as you do when they seem so—” he fumbled for words, gesturing at nothing, and at the bird, “impermanent.”

At this, Feuilly smiled, and it was wistful, but bitter too, and there Grantaire could see the worker’s pain in the slope of his friend’s spine and the way it momentarily bent under the weight that Hercules once bore.

“Ah, but there is your answer,” Feuilly told him, straightening; “how could we live,” he asked Grantaire, “when the concept of a decent world is still seen as impermanent and impossible by rational, educated minds?”

Feuilly shook his head, and the bird on his shoulder shuffled its black wings, skull grinning. “This is where our difference lies, R,” Feuilly continued, gentle for all the steel hiding behind his words. “You are afraid that my death could mean nothing. I, however, am afraid that my life could mean nothing, and in the end, I would only die anyway.”

To this, Grantaire had no answer, and so he returned to his art, and throws out his canvas, painting instead a rough, small, ragged sketch of the future on their shoulders, perched on the overturned end of a blood red flag. If Feuilly took any notice of the painting scrap, he made no comment on it, and left Grantaire’s apartment with his sketch of a pamphlet tucked into his pocket, and an almost unheard promise to return for his paintings, which were drying in the corner next to Grantaire’s half-finished portrait of Joly, Bossuet, and Musichetta.

Grantaire did not sleep that night, nor the next, but the painting was finished, and his supplies exhausted. Most of the works were unusable, and needed to be disposed of, but the bird he kept, and the portrait, too, and propped the latter against his unused bed to dry. As for the scrap of doom’s countenance, this Grantaire left beside a bowl of water near the hatstand, and did his damnedest to forget, regardless of how it stared him in the face every time he came home.

* * *

And all of this brings him to now, after fortnight and more without quality rest, watching the walls of his apartment from his bed, hoping for something, anything to put him out of his misery. He has watched the sun set along the walls, and seen the light of the moon repaint them as it rose, and still even the passing of time and the sheer cliff of his boredom has proved insufficient to lay him low. At this point, Grantaire supposes that he would only feel a quiet relief and perhaps only the faintest bit of confusion as to the failure of the load-bearing beams if his ceiling were to fall inwards and crush him.

In the corner lies his finished painting of Bossuet, Joly, and Musichetta. Rising, Grantaire goes to it and prepares it for transport, thinking that he may as well take it to the three of them and accept their standing offer of asylum under the auspices of presenting a gift so long as he cannot sleep.

As he cements his plan, Grantaire for the first time hears the insistent knocking at his door, and realizes that it has been going on for some time.

Stumbling from his crouched position in the corner by the painting, Grantaire rises for the door, and opens it to find a curious sight, one he had honestly not expected.

“Grantaire,” Enjolras greets him, almost stiffly, and waits in the doorway. His hair is still gold even outside of the firelight of the candles or the sun, and though it has been washed silvery in the moon’s eye, Grantaire is fixated on the curls nonetheless. His clothes are dripping with blood, and his body wracked with bullet holes; Grantaire counts eight shots before he shuts his eyes and forces himself to look away, willing the apparition to disappear.

When Enjolras refuses to vanish into thin air, it takes several more moments of startled blinking for Grantaire to realize that the specter is most likely waiting for permission to enter his home. Pondering in wonderment the novelty of that thought, Grantaire steps backwards into his apartment, mutely gesturing for his ghostly Apollo to follow him.

The absurdity of this hallucination is too much; it had been easier to accept death in his apartment, or the risen mountain of furniture he once saw through his window at dawn. Now, he has Enjolras, dead on his doorstep, and waiting for permission to enter his home. Grantaire grants it without a thought; he would give Enjolras anything. Humoring the illusion of him is nothing in comparison.

“Are you going to ask me if I have been drinking?” He asks eventually, weary, watching the specter of Enjolras watch him, the revolutionary being far too unsubtle and unpracticed at the art of unseen observation.

“No,” the apparition replies, looking as surprised as Grantaire feels. “Why would I assume that? You’ve not been seen in the local establishments for a fortnight, now, and I know that you could not possibly have so much spirits in your home as to conquer your alcohol tolerance.”

“You overestimate me,” Grantaire tells him faintly.

To this, Enjolras only shakes his head. “You underestimate yourself,” he says, and does not elaborate, which is kinder than Grantaire would have supposed his own subconscious to be.

“What is that in your hands?” Enjolras asks him after a moment, the silence between them having grown awkward.

Looking down, Grantaire finds that he has still not let go of the portrait. “Ah,” he says, and does not know why he is so startled by an inquiry so harmless, “a gift, for Joly, Bossuet, and Musichetta, in recompense for their hospitality some time ago.”

“One that you intended to deliver in the middle of the night?” Enjolras asked him, a single eyebrow quirking upwards with the question.

“Oh, the sunlight cracks the paint,” Grantaire deflects weakly, smiling as best he can. He cannot meet Enjolras’s eyes, but he cannot make himself look anywhere else when the rest of world is grayer by comparison in his presence, even though it is false. “I had thought to bring the painting at night to protect it from the sun’s brilliance, though perhaps this is a futile attempt, unless they would prefer to see it only by candlelight, or keep it locked away. The sun gets everywhere, you see,” Grantaire tells him, babbling, “I had thought that I could keep the paint safe and undamaged, but there is no point to this, most likely, only wishful thinking and my own inability to reject the realities unpleasing to me.”

“Why didn’t you ask for help?” Enjolras asks him instead of answering his ramble. Grantaire has never heard him so quiet, though there is something in him that is still fierce as he contemplates the picture by the hatstand, which had dried after several more nights without sleep.

“Because I did not think it would be given,” Grantaire answers him truthfully, for he has never been good at lying to even the image of Enjolras, even if he is very good at lying to himself.

“You cannot possibly believe that,” Enjolras counters him after a moment’s painful silence. It sounds more like a question than Grantaire would prefer, and it is one to which he has no answer, so he does not treat it as one, willing his mind opaque and his eyes unseeing.

“I believe nothing,” Grantaire says instead, “you know that,” and to this Enjolras has no answer, either, and so silence lingers, heavy and thick with the air of May as it winds to close.

“Grantaire,” Enjolras starts, and pauses, gathering his courage almost visibly in a way that startles Grantaire. He had not thought that his Apollo needed time to bring his bravery to the surface, only a cause to rally behind. It is disquieting, in a sense, to realize that he himself has now become one such cause, and that disquiet does not fade when Enjolras fails to extract a shadow from the darkness

“Yes?” He prods Enjolras, because he can’t not, always needing to provoke this man, to tease out all his curiosities even when Grantaire knows that he should leave well enough alone.

“Would you take a seat on the bed?” The specter asks. “I have an idea, and it would be easier if you were already sitting.”

Unbidden, Éponine and Marius’s suggestion rises to the forefront of Grantaire’s addled mind, making him blush and bite the inside of his cheek, lest the wrong question spill slurring from his lips, his stomach sinking into the bottoms of his feet. A dream, then, after all, despite the shadow on the floor.

 _‘This,’_ Grantaire thinks to himself, _‘is what becomes of my mind when it is left to rot, and takes a good man’s likeness with it, too.’_

Grantaire busies his hands with replacing the portrait of the lovers in its corner, and when he turns about, Enjolras is still looking at him, and his gaze is still burning like a brand in its intensity, even so far from the sun.

“Do you permit it?” Enjolras asks him, and Grantaire is only able to nod mutely, taking his hand with an unsteady smile, surprised when he finds that this hallucination, too, is tactile, like the blood on Jehan’s hands, or that which had been on Bahorel’s chest. Grantaire had not thought his subconscious would be so cruel, or worse, if this was meant to be kind.

Quietly, starting slow as Grantaire lowers himself onto the edge of the bed, Enjolras beings to sing. His voice, which Grantaire has always thought beautiful when incensed, is lovelier still when mournful and slow, turning out what Grantaire recognizes eventually as a drinking song, of all things, spun on its head to become a lullaby. Grantaire laughs when he places the tune, and is lulled to quietude by the sound the Latin Quarter’s finest ballad, his head slowly coming to rest on his Apollo’s shoulder as his body grows heavy, his hand still trapped in Enjolras’s grip, where his thumb is circling the skin between Grantaire’s fingers.

Were he in the right mind, Grantaire perhaps would have objected. Not the closeness, which he craves, but the manner in which he has received it, for it smacks of pity and Grantaire is many things, and pitiable is certainly one of them, but never did he wish to take such from his idol. Arguably, Enjolras has seen Grantaire in even worse states, but the embarrassment stands, and it is odd, to have had even one conversation without argument or sniping on either of their accounts, and the peace disquiets Grantaire, though it follow him towards sleep regardless of his wishes.

When he finishes the song, Enjolras is careful to disentangle himself from Grantaire. The firebrand lays him gently on the bed, moving Grantaire with more ginger precision than he would have expected from the sun, a tentativeness that seems uncharacteristic for him, and a hesitation that is much the same.

“Grantaire?” Enjolras calls softly from the doorway, and does not seem to expect an answer, for he continues to speak when Grantaire does not. “Your portrait,” he says, “it’s very beautiful. I’m sure our friends will love it, and Musichetta especially.”

Grantaire is asleep by the time the door clicks shut, but the words follow him to sleep, and when he dreams, he does not remember them in the morning, his nightmares chased away by song and by fire, much sweeter than iron or blood.

In the morning, Grantaire wakes to find that he has slept well through sunrise, and through noon also. Though he rises with a headache, he finds that he is more well rested now than he has been in eons, and it shows in the care of his movements as he bustles about the apartment, making ready his gift to Musichetta and her lovers, preparing it for its journey through the brightest rays of sunlight France had yet to offer, all the late heat of spring waiting outside his door.

When he moves to quit the apartment, Grantaire notices for the first time a series of details his addled mind would once have missed; the bowl of water by the hatstand has been upset, and the painting that had once been there removed. On the floor, there are no trails of blood, nor shards of bone, though his sheets are more mussed in the shape of two people sitting despite Grantaire’s tossing at night, and the lock on his door is somehow unlocked.

When Grantaire sees Enjolras next, June is upon them, and the revolution too. He himself is drunk once more, and Enjolras is burning again, the fire having returned to Apollo, banked only by the night as the moon would temper the sun. Grantaire sees no more visions, but sleep is still lost to him; all these last nights he has heard cannon fire in his dreams, and the noise of it has kept him awake.

He drinks himself silly when the barricades arise, the same as his visions, and as poorly built as he had once accused Courfeyrac. Grantaire cannot keep his mouth shut; the smell of gunpowder will not be blocked by the sting of absinthe, and around him his friends are alive, alive, but they are dying too, and he cannot stand it. Grantaire snaps and jokes when he should not, and when Enjolras turns to him, he commands that the cynic sleep somewhere else.

“Don’t disgrace the barricade!” Enjolras commands him, still pierced with eight shots.

“Let me sleep here,” Grantaire pleads, and remembers a lullaby.

“Go sleep somewhere else!” Enjolras cries, and he is ragged around the edges, and there is blood on his shirt.

“Let me sleep here until I die,” Grantaire asks, him, and his plea is not a plea but prayer, and far too somber for anything.

At his words, there is a flicker of something that a sober Grantaire would have recognized as betrayal before it is chased away by rage. When Enjolras retaliates, he does so quickly, and with some vengeance, throwing Grantaire’s earlier words of disbelief back into his face;

“Grantaire,” he spits, with scorn and spite, “you are incapable of believing, of thinking, of willing, of living, and of dying.”

“You will see,” Grantaire replies, and passes into sleep untroubled with his head upon the table somewhere in the Cortinthe, his friends around him, but gunfire too, and laughter nowhere to be found.

**Author's Note:**

> Insomnia is a cruel mistress. To this, I can personally attest. Writing this was fun, and a bit cathartic. Plus, it gave me something to do at three in the morning when I couldn’t sleep and decided to give up the ghost completely.
> 
> R got a lot wordier and started using less contractions as he got more and more tired, which is something that happens to me when I’m really tired; I get incredibly verbose, and start sounding very purple-prose-y, when written or otherwise, my contractions being the first thing to go. Not sure why this happens, exactly, but I do know for a fact that most of my best writing happens when I’m walking that line between tired and completely out of my mind delirious with sleep deprivation. I assume that the Ernest Hemingway quote about writing drunk and editing sober definitely applies when one switches the mind-altering affliction. I also think that R probably does his best painting when just this side of incomprehensibly smashed, so I decided to flip that condition, too, and let him paint sleep deprived.
> 
> I don’t know why I decided that Combeferre’s fix would be hypnosis, other than the fact that it seems like it would be a very Combeferre thing to do, trying pseudoscience like that.
> 
> “Load-bearing blankets” is probably my favorite line I’ve ever typed, if only for the sheer whimsy of it.
> 
> Grantaire’s hallucinations are the only part of this that isn’t coming directly from personal experience. I mostly have trippy daydreams and frighteningly vivid dreams when I’ve been going through a patch of insomnia. But that’s far less fun to write, so. Score a point for artistic license!
> 
> Yes, Enjolras is, in fact, singing “Drink With Me.” Are you crying yet?
> 
> Inspired equally by my own losing battle with insomnia, and two poems by Algernon Charles Swineburne: [The Garden of Proserpine](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174555#poem%22) and [Hymn to Proserpine](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174559). Seriously, go read the poems, though I'll hand you some verses nonetheless.
> 
> "I am tired of tears and laughter,  
> And men that laugh and weep;  
> Of what may come hereafter  
> For men that sow to reap:  
> I am weary of days and hours,  
> Blown buds of barren flowers,  
> Desires and dreams and powers  
> And everything but sleep.
> 
> Here life has death for neighbour,  
> And far from eye or ear  
> Wan waves and wet winds labour,  
> Weak ships and spirits steer;  
> They drive adrift, and whither  
> They wot not who make thither;  
> But no such winds blow hither,  
> And no such things grow here."  
> — _The Garden of Prosperine_
> 
> "Thou art more than the day or the morrow, the seasons that laugh or that weep;  
> For these give joy and sorrow; but thou, Proserpina, sleep.  
> Sweet is the treading of wine, and sweet the feet of the dove;  
> But a goodlier gift is thine than foam of the grapes or love.  
> Yea, is not even Apollo, with hair and harpstring of gold,  
> A bitter God to follow, a beautiful God to behold?  
> I am sick of singing; the bays burn deep and chafe: I am fain  
> To rest a little from praise and grievous pleasure and pain.  
> For the Gods we know not of, who give us our daily breath,  
> We know they are cruel as love or life, and lovely as death."  
> — _Hymn to Proserpine_


End file.
